Literary Journey without Maps by Graham Greene

[sun surfer]

'His mind crowded with vivid images of Africa, Graham Greene set off in 1935 to discover Liberia, a remote and unfamiliar republic founded for released slaves. Now with a new introduction by Paul Theroux, Journey Without Maps is the spellbinding record of Greene's journey. Crossing the red-clay terrain from Sierra Leone to the coast of Grand Bassa with a chain of porters, he came to know one of the few areas of Africa untouched by colonization. Western civilization had not yet impinged on either the human psyche or the social structure, and neither poverty, disease, nor hunger seemed able to quell the native spirit.'

Goodreads


Anyone can discuss any part or aspect of it at any time, although a softly recommended discussion timeframe is given below.

-The first half by the 22nd of April
-The second half by the 1st of May


This is the MR Literary Club selection for April 2019. Everyone is welcome so feel free to start or join in the conversation at any time; the more the merrier!

[Spinnenmonat]

Is it the first time for our club to read Graham Greene?

[Bookworm_Girl]

Yes, it is! I’m looking forward to it. The other MobileRead book club read Our Man in Havana, which I listened to as an audiobook at the time. I also just read The End of the Affair in March, which I really enjoyed his writing.

[sun surfer]

We're thinking along the same lines, Spinnenmonat, as I'd mentioned something similar in the vote thread. I enjoyed Greene's novel Our Man in Havana (the only Greene I've read so far I think) but wasn't wowed by it; I loved the setting but the story got a little away in places, though other parts were very interesting. So I'm interested to read his nonfiction now, especially as I really liked the preview. I've got the ebook and read a few more pages last night.

[sun surfer]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

I also just read The End of the Affair in March, which I really enjoyed his writing.

That should be interesting for you to be able to compare his writing between the two reading them so close together. Was there any particular reason you chose to read that book last month or simply a whim?

[Bookworm_Girl]

I had purchased it on an Audible sale because it was narrated by Colin Firth and what’s not to like about that! He did a beautiful job capturing the emotional essence of it. I really want to re-read it by ebook because it was so layered. I have been trying to mix-up my audio listens equally between Audible purchases, Scribd and library borrows. I also have a goal to be more purposeful in my purchases and reading this year which means if you buy it then read it soon rather than keep growing your TBR backlog.

[sun surfer]

Ah, nice. Colin Firth sounds like he’d be a perfect narrator for Greene. Good luck with your goal. I don’t have a problem with buying too many books but I do want to read so many and my tbr list seems overwhelming so I guess it’s a little similar, heh.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

Ah, nice. Colin Firth sounds like he’d be a perfect narrator for Greene. Good luck with your goal. I don’t have a problem with buying too many books but I do want to read so many and my tbr list seems overwhelming so I guess it’s a little similar, heh.

I've been able to reduce the number of books that I buy over the years because so much is accessible via libraries and subscriptions now. However I have a tendency to be influenced by sales and then end up not reading the books that I buy because I get distracted by too many other things - like the great book club nominations!

[Bookworm_Girl]

I have read through Part 1 now so almost 1/3 through the book. It reads quickly. He is now at the gateway to entering Liberia.

I did some research on Graham Greene today. Wikipedia has a detailed article. I was surprised to read that Kim Philby was his friend and supervisor at MI6. Of course I recognized that name from the Cambridge Spy Ring, which the Literary Club read a fictionalized account of in The Untouchable by John Banville.

Greene was a very cinematic author. Wikipedia says IMDB lists 66 titles between 1934 and 2010 based on his works. I thought it was funny when he talks almost in embarrassment in A Journey Without Maps about seeing a movie poster based on his work along the route from England to Africa.

I was surprised to read of the number of places that he traveled to and wrote about in his nonfiction works such as Mexico, West Africa, Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, and Argentina. It's not surprising that these people and places would provide inspiration in his fiction works. However, there is a term in the Oxford dictionary called "Greeneland" defined as "The seedy, politically unstable, and dangerous world said to be the typical setting in the novels of Graham Greene" (origin 1940s).

He won the Jerusalem Prize in 1981, which is "a biennial literary award given to writers whose works have dealt with themes of human freedom in society." I was unfamiliar with this award, but the list of past winners is very interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_Prize

[Bookworm_Girl]

One of the things I enjoyed in Part 1 was the reference to other novels and authors that I did not know. For example his list of the typical types of bland, non-critical thinking books one reads for entertainment on a ship or the quote below. I would like to check out some of these other books. Bret Harte's tales of the California Gold Rush sound exciting and exactly the type of old adventures that my husband and I like to read together (especially since I live in the Wild West).

Freetown had a Bret Harte air without the excitement, the saloons, the revolver shots or the horses.

[AnotherCat]

Well, I am very embarrassed because given this book's apparent respected reputation I did not like it at all and I kept drifting off to other reads until abandoning it around halfway through. I read a lot of non-fiction, including travel and memoirs and, for me, this book just didn't make the cut.

The seed of the trouble I had was there was plenty of experiences and other detail to make a very interesting well presented travel/memoir book but I found that it was ruined by prose that I found lumpy to read with poor meter, sentences chopped up with multiple semi-colons, detail jumbled, etc. It seemed to get some legs after the first quarter of the book, but not sufficient to keep me away from, for me, better written books.

His non-serial scene changes in time I thought were handled quite abruptly rather than woven in a way that other authors have done.

I have read, some time ago now, Our Man in Havana and A Quiet American, both of which I recall I liked, so it maybe Greene's non-fiction style that troubles me. Journey was also, as far as I know, his first non-fiction book and produced quite early in his career, perhaps his later travel books I would find more comfortable. But I haven't checked.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Welcome back from your journey, AnotherCat! The link below lists his works in chronological order and also separates the fiction and nonfiction. Journey without Maps was indeed his first non-fiction book and was also early in his fiction-writing career so I suspect that his later works were much improved. It was also his first trip outside of Europe so I wonder if he got better at capturing his experiences and weaving them together as he traveled to more places.

https://www.fantasticfiction.com/g/graham-greene/

[AnotherCat]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

Welcome back from your journey, AnotherCat! The link below lists his works in chronological order and also separates the fiction and nonfiction. Journey without Maps was indeed his first non-fiction book and was also early in his fiction-writing career so I suspect that his later works were much improved. It was also his first trip outside of Europe so I wonder if he got better at capturing his experiences and weaving them together as he traveled to more places.

https://www.fantasticfiction.com/g/graham-greene/

Thanks for the link Bookworm_Girl...

Partly as penance and the rest out of interest I used the link to identify his autobiography Ways of Escape written in 1980 (so at around 76 years of age) and get it. On a quick look at it its style is completely different and an easy and looking to be a very interesting read. There is a section in it on Journeys.. where he quotes from it and also gives Barbara's recount of the same event. His quote sitting in the nice prose of his autobiography is to me stark in its difference, and Barbara's prose, in my view also superior. He comments a bit about wondering how to approach making the book from his short diary entries.

So another one in my reading list (right near the top), that getting longer and my dollars getting shorter .

[Bookworm_Girl]

Sounds interesting! TBR lists are endless. No matter what I do they only seem to grow and certainly don't shrink...

[Spinnenmonat]

I begin to read the book today and I have not yet get adapted into the style of his language. Quite difficult. It seems that we need a lot of annotations to know more about what Greene chose not to impart to us directly.